By Pauline Masson –
A neon sign that once lured travelers to a roadside tourist court keeps the adventure of early Route 66 alive in Pacific.
For more than 40 years, the tall blinking neon sign invited travelers on the new Route 66 to stop overnight in one of The Beacon Court’s “tastefully decorated cottages.”
When it opened in 1946, Beacon Court, located two miles east of Pacific, had ten units. By this time it closed in the 1980s it had expanded to sixteen.
The Beacon Court was one of a row tourist stops along our section of Route 66 between Eureka and Villa Ridge – to this day one of the best maintained and easiest to navigate stretches of the Mother Road.
Unlike hotels that served mostly railroad passengers, tourist courts were meant to accommodate the needs of the newly motoring public. And no road in the U.S. had more lasting pull to motorists than Route 66.
As the new interstate highway opened through Pacific in 1932 tourist stops, billed as tourist courts, tourist cabins or motels, sprang up like mushrooms on the property of every gas station and eatery along the way.
Signs – a few were neon like the Beacon sign- identified the Al-Pac, American Inn, Cape Cod Cabins, Crest Restaurant and Cabins, Diamonds, Double Diamonds, Gardenway, Normandy, Peck’s Farm, Pin Oak, Sunset, Villa Courts and Trail’s End motels. There were probably more.
Travelers on this section of Route 66 had their pick of tourist stops – sixteen and counting along a sixteen mile stretch – as they drove past the gigantic Peck Farm, through the City of Pacific, past the Arboretum (the former Jeffries farm purchased to protect Henry Shaw’s Orchids) and past the Diamonds, an American success story that grew from a hacked together banana stand to a giant tourist attraction.
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Easily the darling of this collection of motorist amenities was L.B. Eckelkamp Jr’s cigar shaped Diamonds Restaurant, which he built the after a fire destroyed the Old Diamonds. He billed the new Diamonds as the “The World’s Largest Roadside Restaurant,” and boasted that the section of Route 66 between the Diamonds and the Twin Bridges was called “The Million Dollars a Mile” section.
A careful look at the grove of trees on the road behind the restaurant reveals a row of neat white tourist cabins tucked under the trees.
I-44 bypassed the original Diamonds in 1960. The restaurant held on until 1967, when the new location opened on I-44 at the Gray Summit exit. Note the orange sign from the original location. The location closed on November 11, 1995, and , like many of the early Route 66 landmarks, has since been demolished.
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This short lived snippet of American History came to an end with the opening of the Interstate-44, a new four-lane roadway that more or less followed the Route 66 alignment.
In April 1960, the Post Dispatch reported that business at the Pin Oak Motel in Villa Ridge – famous for its Saf-Aire Heaters and individual car ports – had fallen by 50 percent within days after I-44 opened.
One after the other, tourist stops on our stretch of Route 66 closed and left their buildings to the elements. Some of the abandoned buildings can still be seen.
With its brilliant neon sign, The Beacon Court would struggle for twenty more years and finally closed for business in1986. In later years a landscape business would occupy some of the Beacon buildings.
The once welcoming sign that the owners built by placing a strip of neon letters atop an old windmill derrick and converting it into a lighted sign. We don’t have the exact date the creative sign was erected, but a 1933 photo includes the sign.
George and Monica Mahler, who drove past the unlit Beacon sign almost every day, decided the sign would be a good addition to the state-of-the-art car wash they were constructing on East Osage in Pacific. They bought the sign and began the project of restoring it.
In February 2007, the Chamber of Commerce and friends posed with the Mahlers for a photo beneath the 27-foot sign to celebrate the restoration project. The Route 66 Association of Missouri awarded the restoration project a grant as an “ideal example” of preserving Route 66 landmarks.
